Reviews
November 2, 2011
William Kennedy’s Long Dry Spell Ends with Chango’s Beads and Two-Toned Shoes 3
by Bill Morris
Along the way there will be a duel, a failed assassination attempt, gun-running, Santeria rituals, kidnapping, torture, scorching sex, and, finally, a coveted interview with Fidel Castro. The storytelling has the irresistible pull of a riptide.
November 1, 2011
Magical Thinking: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights 3
by Michael Bourne
In Blue Nights, Didion is once again following her time-tested formula of setting out a fondly held personal mythos and then smashing it, except that this time the mythos is her own vision of herself as a good mother.
October 27, 2011
When Film Mattered: Pauline Kael’s The Age of Movies 8
by Chris Barsanti
Pauline Kael argued about the movies as though her life depended on it. But that’s not what makes this an essential read for all the uninitiated, nor is it her depth of knowledge, her wit, or her ability to turn a line; it’s that she was so often right.
October 26, 2011
A Novelist Unmoored from Himself: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 13
by Ben Dooley
1Q84 is Murakami’s finest work: nuanced, brilliant, gripping, philosophical but never tendentious, self-assured, cleverly post-modern yet authentic, and possessed of a haunting surrealism that by this point surely deserves its own adjective: Murakamian?
October 25, 2011
Genius At Work: Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods 12
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Shout it from the rooftops, people! Helen DeWitt is back!
October 24, 2011
The Last Slacker: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One 4
by Michael Bourne
In Zone One, as in the original Vietnam-era Living Dead movies, the underlying message seems to be that there is something very destructive in our culture…and it’s spreading.
